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Overview

Plink makes earning rewards for dining, shopping and travel fast and easy by letting consumers register the card of their choice in a simple online loyalty program.

Results

Plink is an online consumer rewards application that incentivizes members to make offline purchases and accumulate points redeemable for everything from Facebook credits to gift cards to charitable donations. The site was originally built on a Cold Fusion platform, but the Plink team was transitioning to Ruby on Rails. With half the site in Ruby and half in Cold Fusion, however, the developers found themselves spending most of their time trying to make the two languages communicate.

Plink hired Pivotal Labs to get the whole team up to speed on Ruby, and to help design the site infrastructure necessary to avoid future coding snafus. “In a 7-week engagement, we’re getting the deliverables we expected, and will easily hit the launch date,” said Co-founder and CEO Peter Vogel. “The Pivots are hard working and extremely efficient.”

The Plink management wasn’t simply looking for a finished product. They needed to make sure the technical team was trained in best practices and equipped to shift capably to 100% Ruby development. “Moving forward, I’m confident they’ll have the know-how and the methodology to work efficiently and utilize everything we’ve learned,” Vogel said.

"Pivotal Labs was very effective at teaching our team Ruby development and agile methodologies. They didn't just show us how, they taught our team best practices and really helped us understand the why of working this way."Peter Vogel, Co-founder and CEO, Plink

Process

The Cold Fusion systems Plink built over the past few years were no longer delivering features. The legacy code was slow. The developers weren’t using a strong unified process or testing methodology. The code base was in bad shape.

Pivotal Labs rewrote their primary web app in Ruby and Ruby on Rails, leveraging the existing data model. But first we focused on the training and enablement of the Plink team—pulling in QA and designers alongside developers. We taught pair programming and trained their product manager to use Pivotal Tracker for maximum efficiency. In the final weeks of the engagement, we shifted from training to product delivery. The Plink team had seen the process work firsthand. Recognizing how quickly it could deliver, they asked us to help them get the project across the finish line.